It’s been a while since my last post here.
This is because I got stuck.
Ever since I came back from Poland last summer, I spent at least 30 mins/day learning Polish. Most days it added up to about 2-3 hrs. I know that compared to real language nerds this isn’t a lot, but nevertheless it led to some kind of burn-out.
I kept up with this consistency until late February. Then the winter term ended and, and so did my regular schedule at the slavic institute.
During those 8 months of studying, I always tried to go for diversity. I read women’s magazines – you never know when you’ll need the polish word for “ovary” – and stuff like Polityka, I watched Talkshows and some episodes of “Czas honoru” (which revealed that german nazi officers apparently spoke some excellent Polish). I listened to Radio Tok.fm for hours and went to conversation classes. I wrote some stuff in Polish, and I listened to several Podcasts. Oh, and I went through flashcards and a vocabulary program and, in addition to that, picked about 1,000 sentences for Anki of which I revised about 200-300.
All in all, I made quite some progress (not quite astonishing given all the time and effort, after all). However, there’s still much room to improve.

But I just needed a break. So I stopped studying Polish for some weeks, and I didn’t feel bad about it – because I know that as soon as I try to force myself to do this stuff, I may start to dislike it.

So I lost my Polish mojo for some time, but that’s okay because I knew that sooner or later, it’d come back.
And so it did indeed when I learnt about the “Read More or Die” Tadoku contest, which is a contest on reading as much as you can in your target language.
I decided to give it a try and read the first part of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy in Polish. By now I’ve reached page 80, and it’s quite a pleasant surprise that I understand way more vocabulary then I did back when I started reading books in English.
So I guess that by now I understand more than 80% of the words, and because of the modular structure of the Polish language, it’s quite easy to figure out new words. (Reading “jadłowstręt” in a paragraph about just how skinny someone is, thinking “jadło” – sounds like some form of “jeść” – “to eat”, oh and “wstręt” means something like “disgust”, so apparently it’s some form of anorexia. Piece of cake, so to speak. Ahem.)